Banks are one of the biggest recruiting agencies in the country and there is a great response for the managerial jobs for the fact that they are open to candidates from almost all the streams. Instead of attending the tests of all the banks individually earlier, the aspirants now have to take the Common Written Examination conducted by the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) for entry into 19 public sector banks.
The next IBPS exam is just a few days away, and will be conducted on June 17. Candidates obviously will now start feeling the real pressure. Here are some suggestions which aspirants should keep in mind during this period while preparing and attempting the exam.
Quantitative aptitude
The quantitative aptitude section has a total of 50 questions. The student can spend around 35-40 minutes for this section. The student has to attempt at least 30-35 out of 50 questions correctly in this section. The questions that appeared in the first IBPS PO exam that was held in Sept 2011 are – 15 Qs on simplifications, 5 Qs on Probability, 20 Qs on DI and 10 Qs on various topics form quant. One can expect this section to be on lines similar to what appeared in the last PO exam. The student should also learn to find the answer by eliminating the choices given in the problem.
English language
This section also has 50 questions. The broad areas that are covered here are RC, Cloze test, Para-forming questions, Vocabulary and Correction of sentences. There is a possibility of some new question types appearing in this section as was the case in the first IBPS PO exam. Those who are comfortable with grammar and vocabulary would do well to deal with these questions first, since they can answer such questions quickly with a reasonable assurance of accuracy. They could then move on to the other tasks such as paragraph sequencing and reading comprehension, which need a little more time.
Those who understand the language but are not sure of its intricacies should first look at the RC questions and then the paragraph sequencing questions. Other questions can be attempted after this. The student should spend about 30 minutes for this test area.
General awareness
Preparation for GA questions in this exam can be best done by:
(a) Focussing on the banking related info, including nationalisation, mergers, tag lines, CMDs, schemes & initiatives, and recent revision of rates and ratios by RBI. New phrases like bail-out, NPAs, NIMs, and LLP etc have to be noted. This will take care of 1/3rd of questions in this section.
(b) Cover all the notes on Current affairs - national and International events for past six months, say November 2011 to April 2012, so that the aspirant is ready to answer about 20 questions easily.
(c) Lastly, the student should make a note and cover all the initiatives, programmes of Government of India, for Indian economy related questions like what is MGNREGP, PURA etc. which may account for 7 -8 questions, and these may be for 12 months events also.
A well-planned effort and focus in the above manner will make student more confident, in answering the GA part successfully. Twenty minutes should be allotted for answering this section.
Computer knowledge
The candidate should spend about 20 minutes in answering this section. Only the basics on computers will be asked in the examination. There will not be any questions asking for the output of the program, algorithm, writing programs etc. The areas from which the questions appear broadly would cover Computer Fundamentals, DBMS, Basics of Networking, Basics of Operating System, Basics of MS office, Basic commands in DOS etc. Candidates should first answer all the easy questions which they are aware of instead of pondering over the difficult and unknown questions.
Reasoning
This section is generally lengthy and time consuming. There is a possibility of new question types appearing in this section and taking the students by surprise. The questions on series, coding, decoding and symbols and notations are generally easy and should be attempted first.
The questions on non-verbal reasoning are scoring and one should not miss out on these. Critical Reasoning questions are time consuming as we first need to analyse the situation given in the question and then answer the questions. The questions on puzzles are worth giving a try. One should not spend more than 40 minutes for this section.
Last but not the least, the aspirant should aim for a very high score by maximising the number of correct attempts. By just clearing the qualifying mark, it is unlikely that the aspirants can expect any interview calls. To get interview calls the candidates must score high in the merit order.
